Bug#624850: perl: FTBFS: Failed test at t/tilde.t line 53

[Niko Tyni]

Package: perl
Version: 5.12.3-6
Severity: important

Summary: oversensitive test case, should be fixed but works everywhere
else including polpora and poulenc.

Dear powerpc buildd maintainers: could you please schedule a retry
on another buildd for the time being and/or fix the passwd database
on voltaire?

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 01:45:10AM +0000, Debian buildds wrote:
>  * Source package: perl
>  * Version: 5.12.3-6
>  * Architecture: powerpc
>  * State: failed
>  * Suite: sid
>  * Builder: voltaire.debian.org
>  * Build log: https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=perl&arch=powerpc&ver=5.12.3-6&stamp=1304300272&file=log

The failure is

  #   Failed test at t/tilde.t line 53.
  #          got: ''
  #     expected: undef
  Use of uninitialized value $home in concatenation (.) or string at t/tilde.t line 55.
  cpan/Module-Build/t/tilde......................................FAILED at test 1

The relevant code is

    unless (defined $home) {
      my @info = eval { getpwuid $> };
      skip "No home directory for tilde-expansion tests", 15 if $@;
      $home = $info[7];
    }

which ends up with $home == undef but doesn't skip the tests.

It looks like this happens (at least) if the current user doesn't have
a passwd entry at all.

 % perl -wE 'eval { @i=getpwuid 40000}; die $@ if $@; say $i[7]'
 Use of uninitialized value in say at -e line 1.

The test is buggy as it should have a better guard for getpwuid failure.
It should certainly be fixed.

However, this hasn't changed from 5.10.1 AFAICS and seems to work on all
the other buildds so building it somewhere with a good passwd database
would be the quickest way to get the 5.12 transition going.

See also #479944.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org